Boris Mann's Link Blog

The internet-connected individual has faster and higher-quality access to news today than we did back then. What we lack as a society is the ability to synthesize all of those voices. And there are very smart, connected people who are using that fact to distract and divide us. It’s not enough to have access to al-Jazeera or the BBC or Russia Today; we need to develop a level of news literacy few of us have to understand the forces at work, what they want us to believe and why.

bestkungfu weblog » 20 years

Indie bookstores are selling (not closing) - what's the story? →

bookavore:

Other bookstores closed. These did not. Why not? And what will happen to them now? This seems like a good moment in time to ask those questions, and could provide us with a good new way to think about bookstores and books and all that.

I would love to run a coffee shop some day. I mean, bookstore.

It matters little what the e-book actually costs.

It only matters what the audience thinks they should cost.

Now, the audience won’t agree on an actual number (they’re cagey, those fuckers), but what they do seem to roughly agree on is, e-books should be cheaper than their print counterparts. What the e-book actually costs is irrelevant. What matters is the expected value loss by going with an ephemeral digital item — and, further, added into that is the expectation of, “I bought a device to read this, which cost me money already.”

Thinking The Wrong Things About E-Book Pricing

I’m annoyed when I’m standing in a Chapters (or e-book showroom, as I like to think of them) and see hardcover books for less than the ebook. But I’m still not buying the hardcover.

As Tim O’Reilly famously said, books don’t have a piracy problem. They have an obscurity problem. I have never met an author who didn’t wish that more people would read her book.

Piracy? You wish. - The Domino Project

Seth Godin on ebook piracy. With the infrastructure for paying for ebooks firmly in place, DRM is a red herring. Discovery IS the challenge.

More on DRM and ebooks - Charlie's Diary →

Stross’ background on why he thinks publishers dropping DRM on ebooks is a good thing.

The one thing I have to add, is that as well as diversification on the retail side - the sellers - it opens up the opportunity of diversity on the reader side.

If you can use any reader to use any book, then “specialist” reader (and library) ebook applications become possible.

And the only viable Plan C [for publishers], for breaking Amazon’s death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.

What Amazon’s ebook strategy means - Charlie’s Diary

There have been a lot of great articles around publishing and ebooks over the weekend. Charlie’s post is one of the best.

Gruber doesn’t think publishing will be able to let go of DRM, but if they do, Amazon is in trouble, since “Amazon is the one whose Kindle devices and apps do not support DRM-free ePub books”.

I’d love to think that the next two years will see news organisations around the world ditching clunky legacy enterprise publishing systems, and moving to the user-centred designed fleet-footed type of publishing tools that, frankly, bloggers and others have been using on the web for a decade already.

Journalist-centred design for the CMS

Replace “news organisations” with organisations of any type, and the publishing part of “legacy enterprise publishing systems”, and it’s the hope that everyone has that organisations will demand and get better software.

While many advertisers are still experimenting with this tactic, some appear to have fully embraced it, using 2D codes in anywhere from 25% to 80% of their total print advertisements.

Black, White, and Read All Over: Competitrack’s New Report on 2D Code Advertising

Many people are embracing QR codes in print. I think this is because there is NO tracking for print, so for execs, seeing “hits” is all it takes — they feel in control because they now have some data. All other data seems to point towards disappointing experiences on the other end of those QR codes.

It’s that your ‘website’ is no longer your ‘site’. You can no longer equate your digital publication or presence with your website. It’s just one iteration of it. And that is a real sea-change in digital publishing.

Mobile Revolution (Geeks Only) | Talking Points Memo

Talks about the growth in mobile visits, so the mobile “version” of your site, may in fact become your site. Time to start investing.

One thing I believe but won’t try to prove (which means “take it on faith”) is that more attention has been paid to the change from print reading to screen reading than to the change from store purchasing to screen purchasing. But the change in purchasing behavior is by far more significant in its affect on the industry than the change in consumption, at least in the medium term.

By one benchmark at least, we are probably halfway through the (r)evolution – The Shatzkin Files

The story of ebooks is big. The larger canvas of the continued growth of ecommerce - away from bricks-and-mortar retail - is big in ALL categories.